It was an extraordinary opportunity to take out somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of the Islamic State’s entire truck fleet. And after destroying 116, the Americans ran out of ammunition. The remaining 184 trucks were not destroyed.

That’s not all!

“We have not struck these trucks before,” Warren said. “We assessed that these trucks, while although they are being used for operations that support ISIL, the truck drivers, themselves, [are] probably not members of ISIL; they’re probably just civilians. So we had to figure out a way around that. We’re not in this business to kill civilians, we’re in this business to stop ISIL — to defeat ISIL.”

No you’re not, no you’re not.

If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

Tarte Tatin at the NYT What a horrible mess they’ve made. Not quite fair to pick on the NYT Food folks. The section’s been a near-disaster for a long time. But this one, wow: boughten puff pastry, ordinary apples, an odd intro, and suspect history. (In the print version, there’s more than half a page of unannotated b+w pix, the last one a real charm, signifying a lack of ads, I suppose.)

Men: If you shave, and if you work, shave before you go to work. The rule that applies here: work is about work, not about you. If you look like you got up late, drank too much last night, been seeing a little sweetie on the side, etc, then you become the subject. How can I say this? You’re just not that remarkable. So…
Shave + Work = Not You (and that’s good!)

Understatement: “The men’s marathon at the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis took place on August 30 of that year. Thirty-two athletes representing four nations competed, but only 14 managed to finish the race, which proved to be a bizarre affair due to poor organization and officiating.”

However, a great thinker who has spent decades on an unusual line of thought cannot induce their context into your head in a few pages. It’s almost certainly the case that you don’t fully understand their statements.

Instead, you can say:

I have now learned that there exists a worldview in which all of these statements are consistent.

And if it feels worthwhile, you can make a genuine effort to understand that entire worldview. You don’t have to adopt it. Just make it available to yourself, so you can make connections to it when it’s needed.

My apologies for such thievery, but this is quite excellent (common sense, yes, but that seems rare enough!). Your job as a reader is to try to understand — once you’ve decided that the author is honest and trustworthy.

Mr. Kelly edits and owns Cool Tools, a website that writes about neat stuff and makes small money off referral revenue from Amazon when people proceed to buy some of those things. He decided to edit the thousands of reviews that had accrued over the last 10 years into a self-published print catalog — also called “Cool Tools” — which he would then sell for $39.99.

The letters’ estimated value, according to a gallery owner who specializes in Banksy’s work, is between $200,000 and $300,000. But in the view of the Police Department, which has categorized the balloons as “arrest evidence,” they are somewhat less rarefied, possibly to their peril.

“I don’t have it as art on the invoice,” said Deputy Chief Jack J. Trabitz, the commanding officer of the property clerk division, which maintains facilities around the city for evidence storage. “We have it as a balloon.”
– Police Confiscate Banksy Balloons and Say They’re Not Art, NYT, 11/5/2013

(They know, too; they’ve been teaching “Applied Art” down at the Police Academy for decades now!)